Category: multiplication
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Maximum Adds per second for 1950s/early 1960s computers
Relative digital computer performance has been measured, since the mid-1960s, by timing how long it takes to execute one or more programs. Until the early 1990s Whetstone was widely used, and then SPEC brought things up to date. Running the same program on multiple computers requires that it be written in a language that is…
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CPU power consumption and bit-similarity of input
Changing the state of a digital circuit (i.e., changing its value from zero to one, or from one to zero) requires more electrical power than leaving its state unchanged. During program execution, the power consumed by each instruction depends on the value of its operand(s). The plot below, from an earlier post, shows how the…